Melissa Kaufman - Founded: The No B.S. Guide for Student Entrepreneurs

Founded is the ultimate guide for accelerating your startups progress! I wish I had this book before launching my startup, Amperit would have set the right foundation and saved a ton of time and mistakes in going from zero to one. This book is a cheat code to making the wild adventure of building your company more intentional, fun, and focused!

Akshat Thirani, Garage alum, CEO and co-founder, Amper

The advice in Founded is what I wish I knew before starting my first company in college. The early stages of company building can be difficult, and Founded does a great job of consolidating important pieces of information around customer discovery, product validation, and legal. I would highly recommend anyone even considering entrepreneurship to check it out!

Sarah Ahmad, Garage alum, CEO and co-founder, Stable (YC W20)

Founded is the distillation of thousands of firsthand student experiences with company building. It crystallizes those journeys into a fantastic and practical guide for the aspiring student founder.

Manish Patel, partner, Nava Ventures, and lecturer at Stanford

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher and author are not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional services. Nothing herein shall create an attorney-client relationship, and nothing herein shall constitute legal advice or a solicitation to offer legal advice. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

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Print ISBN: 978-1-63909-007-5

eBook ISBN: 978-1-63909-008-2

First Edition

For our students

Dont think of the Valley as some ZIP codes in California. It is a state of mind that can be anywhere, for everyone.

JOHN DOERR

The Garage at Northwestern University was founded in 2015 and is a community and physical space for every Northwestern student interested in entrepreneurship to learn, iterate, and grow. It supports university students at all levels of studyundergraduate, graduate, and PhD. In its first six years, The Garage supported thousands of students and incubated over 1,000 student-founded startups.

At The Garage, weve learned a lot about student entrepreneurship. This unique perspective has allowed us to observe patterns for success in student founders, as well as common pitfalls and misperceptions about entrepreneurship. Our goal with this book is to help you learn from these experiences.

Growing The Garage from scratch has given us the opportunity to build what we wish wed had as college students. Weve combined real-world learnings from our professional experiences with the startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley to create the ultimate community and destination for student founders.

Although The Garage is named after the proverbial scrappy startup garage that the most valuable companies were founded in (e.g., Apple, Microsoft), our physical space is actually housed on the second floor of a parking garage. Its meant to feel raw and unfinished, despite being hyperdesigned by Gensler, one of the top architectural firms in the world, responsible for designing Facebooks headquarters and The Washington Posts offices, among many others.

The space has polished cement floors and exposed ceilings. Its filled with neon signs, beanbags, dry erase walls, graffiti artwork, and every other startup clich. We love when employees of startups or tech companies visit and tell us that it reminds them of their office. We want students to get comfortable in a work environment without assigned seats or cubicles but with perks like free snacks and robots roaming around, so they will feel more at home in these environments in the future.

More important than our physical space is the vibrant and diverse community of student entrepreneurs that has flourished at The Garage. The students are brilliant. What they lack in experience they make up for in curiosity and the willingness to try, learn, and iterate. Kellogg MBA students work alongside undergraduates, and music majors sit next to electrical engineers. The community is bonded over a desire to build their ideas, and students encourage each other to take risks. They are each others first beta customers and share valuable knowledge and resources.

The students are also supported by a broader community of staff members, professional service providers, and volunteer mentors and experts. The staff prioritize the student experience, building relationships with the students and ensuring they get the resources they need to be successful. Vetted attorneys, accountants, and other professional service providers volunteer their time and expertise to meet with student founders during office hours. Each student team is paired with a business professional or seasoned entrepreneur who serves as a dedicated team mentor. In addition, hundreds of alums and business leaders in our expert network have offered to take calls and meetings with our student founders.

The Garage isnt a class, and there arent any grades. Instead, it is a series of experiences designed to teach students an entrepreneurial mindset and skill set through experiential learning. We believe students learn entrepreneurship through repeat exposure to entrepreneurship, such as meeting experienced founders, visiting startup offices, collaborating with like-minded peers, and, most importantly, working on their own entrepreneurial project.

By normalizing this style of activity, students learn how to think and act like an entrepreneur. Were also proponents of the see one, do one, teach one philosophy. Many of our students will join another startup team their freshman year, then launch their own ventures in their sophomore and junior years, and many of them become peer mentors in their senior year, advising younger students based on their own experiences. We encourage our students to live Paul Grahams mantra of Make something people want.

We also wrote this book because there is an overwhelming amount of bad advice and misleading information about entrepreneurship online, and much of it is from people with very little entrepreneurial experience or exposure themselves who are solely looking to profit from uninformed and vulnerable young people with an interest in entrepreneurship. Our goal is to cut through the noise and give you practical, tested advice on how to get started without any of that intimidating jargon or hustle culture. The ideas and lessons well discuss are based on real-world learnings and anecdotes from student founders.